Kara Walker: Silhouettes, Sugar and a Fountain for the Atlantic

On 10 May 2014 the public was let into the former Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at Kent Avenue and South 1st Street, to meet a sphinx coated in sugar. It measured 75.5 feet long, 35.5 feet high and 26 feet wide. Leading up to it, across a 30,000 square foot industrial hall, stood fifteen boys about five feet tall, carrying baskets and bananas, scaled up from collectible figurines. Five of them were made of sugar.

The work’s full title ran to a paragraph. Creative Time, which commissioned it, gave it as At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker Has Confected: A Subtlety Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. It closed on 6 July 2014. The building it stood in was about to be torn down.

Everything about the project, its size, its material, its brevity, its setting in a factory built on the sugar trade, depended on a language Walker had been refining for twenty years at a much smaller scale.

The silhouette as history painting

Kara Walker grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, after a birth in Stockton, California, in 1969, according to Tate. She graduated from the Atlanta College of Art with a BFA in 1991, then completed an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, as Art21 and the Walker Art Center both record.

Her medium was the cut paper silhouette, a form better known for polite profile portraits, which she applied to the history of American slavery. Black figures, cut from paper and fixed directly to white gallery walls, act out scenes of plantation life: masters and mistresses, enslaved men, women and children, caught in violence, sex and farce. In the Walker Art Center’s reading, the figures replay a twisted version of history as they try to rewrite their own standing and how they are seen.

One early wall piece announced the method in its title alone: Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart, a reference to Gone with the Wind, as Art21 notes. The title borrows the voice of the popular romance and the stereotype it trades on, and the image delivers what that voice leaves out.

The form is disarming because it looks polite. A silhouette reduces a body to an outline, and an outline is where a caricature lives. Walker uses that reduction to show how racial stereotypes work: as shapes that viewers recognise instantly, and so take part in. Art21 describes the effect as drawing viewers in as complicit participants.

Recognition followed fast. Walker received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. She represented the United States at the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo, the same year her exhibition Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On) was shown at the Guggenheim. The Deutsche Bank Prize came in 2004 and the Larry Aldrich Award in 2005. Darkytown Rebellion dates from 2000.

A survey in Minneapolis

Her first full American museum survey opened in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center, on 17 February 2007. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love was organised by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond with the artist, and it went well beyond the wall silhouettes: room size tableaux, film animations, and more than 100 works on paper. After Minneapolis it travelled to the ARC/Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, closing in May 2008.

The Walker kept a deep holding. Its collection now lists nineteen works by her, among them Cut (1998), Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress (2001), Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004), 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005), Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), Porgy & Bess (2013) and Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021). The list traces the move from cut paper into film, and into annotations of historical sources such as Harper’s illustrated account of the Civil War.

The Walker’s text for the survey quotes the artist’s own diagnosis of what her figures carry: “the black subject in the present tense is the container for specific pathologies” inherited from historical trauma. The past, in her work, is never safely past.

Sugar

A Subtlety took that conviction out of the gallery. It was Walker’s first major public project, and it turned the subject of her silhouettes into the material of the work. Creative Time framed the piece as a response to the history of the industrial site and to the sugar trade’s ties to slavery and empire. The plant had refined sugar; the sphinx was coated in it.

The subtitle names the people the work honours: the unpaid and overworked artisans who refined the sweet tastes of the New World, from the cane fields to the kitchens. The sweetness on the table becomes, in Walker’s hands, a monument to the labour that produced it, and a temporary one, since both the sculpture and the building were set to disappear.

A fountain in the Turbine Hall

Five years later Walker made a monument meant to answer other monuments. Fons Americanus, the fifth Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, was unveiled on 2 October 2019. It stood 13 metres high: a working fountain with two oval basins and a multi tiered central pedestal, figures on all four sides, water spouting from the top.

It took its form from the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, a monument designed in 1901 and unveiled ten years later. Where that memorial celebrates empire, Walker’s version tells an origin story of the African diaspora, tying together Africa, America and Europe through water and the transatlantic slave trade. Tate’s guide walks through the cast. Venus stands at the summit. A laughing Queen Vicky occupies the second tier. Below are a figure of Melancholy, a kneeling man who may be the West Indies governor Sir William Young, and a Captain who combines historical rebels including Toussaint L’Ouverture and Marcus Garvey. Nearby sit a smaller Shell Grotto with a weeping boy in a well, a tree with a noose that recalls lynching, and a leaking fishing boat.

The sources run through art history as well as political history. Tate’s press release lists J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (1899), Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), and the nineteenth century propaganda image The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies. Its structure was cork, wood and metal that could be recycled, finished with a cement and acrylic coating made without solvents. Walker signed it “Kara Walker, NTY”, for Not Titled Yet, a play on the letters of British honours such as the OBE.

Tate’s curators for the commission were Clara Kim, Priyesh Mistry and Petra Schmidt. That same year the Royal Academy of Arts elected Walker an Honorary Royal Academician, a year after her election to the American Philosophical Society.

From a sheet of black paper on a white wall to a 13 metre fountain in the Turbine Hall, the scale changed. The method did not. Walker takes a form that once served to flatter, the profile portrait, the sugar confection, the imperial fountain, and uses it to show what the flattery concealed.